Sign up for POLITICO Magazine's weekly email: The Friday Cover

Why Does Barack Keep Making Weird Jokes About Michelle?

By DR. STEVEN BERGLAS

November 19, 2013

Clinical psychologist Steven Berglas will put Washington on the couch, starting with today’s debut of The POLITICO Shrink. An expert on the psychological consequences of success, he will use the column to peer into the psyches of the leaders who run our country.

Most Popular

As obsessed with message control as President Obama might be, every so often the mask slips and we get a glimpse of him as a regular guy, not the most powerful leader on Earth. One such moment occurred in September, when a microphone picked up a casual conversation between Obama and a United Nations official at the General Assembly gathering in New York. When asked if he had quit smoking, the president said he hadn’t had a cigarette in six years, adding, with a huge grin, “That’s because I’m scared of my wife.”

You might reasonably conclude that this was a harmless joke, a light-hearted moment of male bonding. Not me; I’m one of those quasi-Freudians who believe that jokes, like dreams and slips of the tongue, reveal repressed feelings, the emotional content of our lives that we would rather not address head-on. This joke—and other seemingly offhanded remarks Obama has made about his wife—tell us a whole lot about both the president’s self-esteem and his relationship with Michelle.

One aspect of joking that Sigmund Freud dealt with extensively in his 1905 treatise, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, was what he termed “tendentious humor”—hostility “disguised” as a jape or jibe to give the joke teller plausible deniability.

Consider the following bit of presidential humor. At a fundraiser for LGBT supporters last summer, Obama made a point of thanking Ellen DeGeneres, one of Hollywood’s most prominent lesbians, for introducing him: “I want to thank my wonderful friend, who accepts a little bit of teasing about Michelle beating her in pushups… but I think she claims Michelle didn’t go all the way down.”

Reactions were immediate. “Did President Obama make a blowjob joke?” BuzzFeedasked. The White House pool report noted that the president “let [the line] hang, naughtily, provoking laughter from the crowd.” Maybe that was the point: The comedic pause meant Obama could deny hostile intent by doing a “What, me funny?” imitation of Alfred E. Neuman. (As for the idea that the president stumbled into this obvious double entendre by accident—certainly that's what many Beltway insiders ultimately concluded, to which I say: Come on, we’re talking about one of the world’s most renowned public speakers.)

To me the important question is: What does it say about President Obama’s feelings for his wife that he made what certainly seems to be an oral sex joke about her in front of a room full of people?

Let’s take a look at some other comments the president has made about her. In an interview the First Couple did with Vogue earlier this year, they were asked what they each have learned from each other. Mrs. Obama answered: “I’ve learned to let go and enjoy … not take things too personally.” Mr. Obama’s response? “What Michelle has done is to remind me every day of the virtues of order,” he said. “Being on time. Hanging up your clothes.”

READ MORE

Should we infer that President Obama sees the first lady as a controlling martinet who is not too enthusiastic about unconventional sex? Probably not. More accurately, we might wonder whether the president’s barbed comments about his wife suggest that he resents needing her. It’s hard to be a divorced politician, after all. If you believe that “a thing said in jest, is half confessed” you’d have to conclude that much of what the president says about his wife reveals at least some degree of contempt for her.

But why? Michelle Obama is a veritable superwoman—a Princeton- and Harvard-educated attorney, stylish companion, loving mother and unwavering supporter of her husband. What’s not to like?

The Vogue interview offers some clues. “Michelle grew up in a model nuclear family: mom, dad, brother,” the president said. “There’s just a warmth and a sense of belonging. And you know, that’s not how I grew up. I had this far-flung family, father left at a very young age, a stepfather who ended up passing away as well. My mother was this wonderful spirit, and she was adventurous but not always very well organized.”

The first lady, in other words, grew up in an Ozzie & Harriet-type family—the kind Obama has said he wishes he’d had, sometimes even distorting his history to convince himself that he did. In his autobiography, Dreams From My Father, the president idealizes the man who married and then dumped his mother. You can try to spin this all you want, but the fact is that a man who is abandoned in infancy by his father is psychologically scarred for life.